Taiping Jing: The Origin and Transmission of the 'Scripture on General Welfare'-The History

of an Unofficial Text- by Barbara Kandel

Review by: Robert G. Henricks
Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 103, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1983), pp. 800-801
Published by: American Oriental Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/602269 .
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800 Journal of the American Oriental Society 103.4 (1983)
officials. From this point of view, only a career with didactic
value can earn one biographical treatment, within an overall
plan of providing warnings and models for place-holders.
This functional approach rules out the appreciation of indi-
vidual lives, at one extreme, or the comprehensive depiction
of an age, at the other, as historiographical desiderata. In
practice, social and political realities produce a very different
result. Overall, about 80% of the biographical subjects are
members of the ruling elite, selected on the basis of their
prestige rather than of the exemplary character of their lives.
This form of bias has the ironic result that we do, in fact, get
biographies that display "entirely normal" (albeit super-elite)
careers, contrary to historiographical ideology.
Liu traces that ideology from the "praise and blame" inter-
pretation of the Ch'un-ch'iu, through the categories of "up-
right officials" (hsun-li) and "cruel officials" (ku-li) in the
Shih chi, into the mainstream of official historiography. The
heart of his argument is that the moral intensity of Sung
Neo-Confucianism, transmitted through the editorial labors
of Ou-yang Hsiu and Sung Ch'i, made the HTS the high
water mark of didactic biography. An interesting tabulation
(pp. 29-30) of all the biographical categories for officials
employed in the standard histories reveals that the HTS has
the most highly articulated system, and is the first to deploy
the wicked/insubordinate/rebellious troika of deviance that
is Liu's particular concern.
He demonstrates that the terms chien, p'an and ni have
highly specific meanings, and that the divisions (e.g., shang,
hsia) within the respective chapters are, at least to some
extent, historiographical groupings rather than simply the
result of bookmaking requirements. The chien-ch'en (exem-
plified by Fu Yu-i, Li Lin-fu and Lu Ch'i) are all extremely
high-ranking civil officials, with the 223-shang group all
associated in some way with Empress Wu. The p'an-ch'en
(exemplified by Ch'en Shao-yu and Kao P'ien) and the ni-
chMen(exemplified by Li Hsi-lieh) are troublesome military
men, differentiated by the additional stigma of open rebellion
and the establishment of hostile regimes in the latter case.
The 224-shang group is made up of 8th century military
governors, while 224-hsia seems to be "all other pan." In
similar fashion, 225-shang deals with the An Lu-shan rebel-
lion, 225-chung is "other 8th century rebels," and 225-hsia is
"late 9th century rebels." Liu analyzes the rhetoric of denun-
ciation in these chapters, which is somewhat repetitive, but
understandably emphasizes power-hunger in ch. 224 and mis-
rule in ch. 225.
Editorial significance in the arrangement of HTS 223-225
is guaranteed by the survival of the Chiu Tang shu (CTS),
criticism of which stimulated the compilation of HTS, and
which fails to assemble these biographies in any similar fash-
ion. Liu has some kind words for CTS relative to HTS,
which he perceives as a triumph of style over intelligibility.
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A word-for-word comparison of the translation of the bio-
graphy of Fu Yu-i with the original shows the work to be
conscientiously and reliably done. These translations are a
solid contribution to our understanding of a major biographi-
cal type, while the first part of the work is a rapid but
intelligent overview of the issues raised by the official bio-
graphical tradition in general.
DENNIS GRAFFLIN
BATES COLLEGE
Taiping Jing: The Origin and Transmission of the 'Scripture
on General Welfare' The History of an Unofficial
Text-. By BARBARA KANDEL. Pp. I I 1. Hamburg:
GESELLSCHAFT FUR NATUR-UND VOLKERKUNDE Os-
TASIENS. 1979. 28. -DM.
Barbara Kandels's study of the history of the T'ai-p'ing
ching is a welcomed addition to the growing body of
literature on popular or religious Taoism.
The book is divided into seven sections. The topics are:
I) The prognostic 'Scripture on general welfare and the
keeping of the original mandate according to the calendar
revealed by the officers of Heaven'; 2) The origin of the
Taoist 'Book on general welfare with the title written in
blue'; 3) The Yellow Turbans' use of the 'Book on general
welfare with the title written in blue'; 4) The development of
religious Taoism and the 'Book on general welfare with the
title written in blue'; 5) The emergence of a 'Scripture on
general welfare' in the 6th century; 6) The Tao-tsang
'Scripture on general welfare' and its history; and 7) The
traditional roles of the 'Scripture on general welfare'-the
development from an 'unofficial' to an 'official' text.
I might summarize the main argument as follows. 1) The
present Tao-tsang copy of the T'ai-p'ing ching is based on
Yu Chi's (some texts say Kan Chi) 2nd century A.D. T'ai-
p'ing ch'ing-ling shu (Kandel's 'Book on general welfare with
the title written in blue'), which in turn was based on Kan
Chung-k'o's Ist century B.C. Tien-kuan li pao-yuan t'ai-p'ing
ching (Kandel's 'Scripture on general welfare and the
keeping of the original mandate.. .'). 2) Yu Chi's text
survived in several circles of Taoism through the Six
Dynasties but was mentioned very little in contemporary
sources since the text originated with the masses, and
Taoism as a religion was becoming a matter of the cultured
elite. 3) Yu Chi's text was re-edited and re-introduced in the
6th century by members of the Shang-ch'ing sect in response
 Reviews of Books
to competition from Buddhism and because of its mass
appeal. 4) It was in this way-because of the social position
of the Shang-ch'ing sect-that this unorthodox text became
"official."
That the present Tao-tsang text of the T'ai-p'ing ching is
indeed, for the most part, a genuine Han dynasty work, is a
point also argued by B. J. Mansvelt Beck in his article "The
Date of the Taiping Jing" (T'oung Pao, LXVI:4-5(1980),
pp. 149-182), an article which covers much the same ground
as the book here being reviewed. From the point of view of
pure textual history, Beck's study is superior to Kandel's.
Moreover, he writes with more authority and more
precision. In his article he reviews scholarly opinion (Chinese
and Japanese) on the authenticity of the present text and
neatly summarizes the pros and cons of the various
arguments (pp. 175-176), things which Kandel does not do.
And, he provides an enlightening account of the content of
Wang Ming's brilliant piece of work, T'ai-p'ing ching ho-
chiao (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chu, 1960).
The virtue of Dr. Kandel's study lies in the attention paid
to the "social" history of the text-i.e., her exploration of the
backgrounds of people like Kan Chung-k'o and Yu Chi, and
her examination of the role played by the T'ai-p'ing ch'ing-
ling shu in the revolt of the Yellow Turbans. Also worthy of
mention is her discussion of the "T'ai-p'ing faction" at court
in the Ist century B.C.
I would offer two criticims of the book. 1) There is no
discussion of the contents of the T'ai-ping ching,-its
ideological claims. We can find this, of course, in
Kaltenmark's article ("The Ideology of the T'ai-p'ing ching,"
pp. 19-52 in Welch and Seidel, ed., Facets of Taoism), but
something should be said about this here at least in summary
fashion. 2) Secondly, though it is not central to her work,
Dr. Kandel gives very little credit to the genuineness of
religious experience in interpreting the phenomena of
religion. For example, on p. 23, in accounting for the rise of
religious Taoism in the 2nd century A.D., she says that the
lives of the masses were so bad at that time that "Many took
to religion as a refuse from their misery, and their needs
formed a religion. . ." (italics added). And later on p. 52, in
talking about the T'ai-p'ing ch'ing-ling shu in relation to the
Yellow Turbans and Chang Chueh, she says that the rebels
"adopted the Daoist view of the world" (italics added), and
"Zhang Jue, we may conclude, used the TPQLS for
propaganda purposes because parts of its contents were
similar to his own aim." Underlying such statements is a
methodological presupposition about the integrity of religion
that needs to be defended, or abandoned. That the popular
sects involved in peasant revolts in China often acted out of
genuine religious concern is a point shown rather
conclusively by Daniel Overmyer (Folk Buddhist Religion:
Dissenting Sects in Late Traditional China).
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801
The book is relatively free from typographical errors
though there are a few. No Chinese characters are given and
the romanizaiton used is pin-.in.
ROBERT G. HENRICKS
DARTMOUTH COLLEGE
The Evolution of Chinese Tz'u Poetry: From Late Tang to
Northern Sung. By KANG-I SUN CHANG. Pp. xv + 251.
Princeton: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. 1980. $17.50.
Ms. Sun's study of tz'u poetry is a well-written, well-edited
work that achieves a good balance between overview and
detail. The work not only fills an important gap in Chinese
literary studies, it also strengthens previous works that deal
with tz'u in more limited terms. Using Western techniques of
close reading to evaluate poetry in light of traditional tz'u
hua criticism, Sun describes the development of the genre
from the T'ang to its full flowering in the Northern Sung.
The scope of the author's study makes her method somewhat
reductive, but her ability to clear away the extraneous and to
synthesize her material into convincing conclusions makes
the danger of reductivism well worthwhile.
Of five chapters, the first deals with the rise of tz'u in the
Tang, while the remainder discuss five poets as representatives
of and innovators in the growth of the genre. Each of these
poets is evaluated against his historical background and in
light of his contributions to the basic literary forms and
styles that Sun uses to define the development of the genre.
The growth of tz'u, according to Sun, can be viewed as a
movement away from the shorter hsiao-ling form towards
the longer man-tz'u form. In terms of style the growth is
more dialectic; both implicit (i.e., symbolic-lyrical) and ex-
plicit (i.e., descriptive-narrative) styles of individual poets are
fused by later poets into different configurations until fully
synthesized by Su Shih of the Sung. Ms. Sun's analysis
focuses on the paratactic/hypotactic tensions of this dialectic,
highlighting those tensions with a comparison of language
use and patterns of stanzaic transition.
In chapter one the author describes how the popular song
worked its influence on the established chiieh-cha to move
the hsiao-ling towards its two-stanza form. This movement
Sun identifies with the emergence of the new literary genre,
and suggests a date of A.D. 850. In the second chapter she
argues that the tz ' of Wen T'ing-yun (ca. 812-ca. 870)
represents a more traditional Chinese poetic style, being
paratactic, imagistic, and implicit, while Wei Chuang (ca.
836-910) introduces more popular strains with his hypotactic,
narrative, explicit rendering of the tz'u themes (themes largely
defined by romantic love). Chapter three discusses the mature